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Introduction

In the early 1990s the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus commissioned Rautavaara to write an extensive choral work, specifying that the text and music were to ‘have a relationship to the world of today’. The result was the Canción de nuestro tiempo (1993), for which Rautavaara chose poems by Federico García Lorca which, though written in the 1920s and 1930s, he felt were still very relevant.

The first of the work’s three movements, Fragmentos de agonía (‘Fragments of agony’), shows the harsh, inhuman world of industrial society and war through surrealist poetic images. The mechanical ostinato progresses inexorably; the parallel with the opening of the Suite de Lorca, written two decades earlier to a text by the same poet, is clear. Finally, the moon rises (echoing another passage in the Suite de Lorca). The musical material here is derived from the same twelve-tone row as Rautavaara’s Seventh Symphony and Die erste Elegie.

Meditación primera y última (‘First and last meditation’) is built on a recurring Rautavaara device: a mid-range sound field with superimposed melodies. The material here is adapted from a scene in the opera Thomas, and Rautavaara later orchestrated it for his Eighth Symphony. The sound-field device appears in more organized form in Canticum Mariae virginis, and also in the more extensive Katedralen.

In Ciudad sin sueño (‘Sleepless city’), Rautavaara so strongly identified the powerful imagery of the poem with the then current situation in world politics that he subtitled the movement Nocturno del Sarajevo. The opening of the movement, with piercing cries over a steady pulsation, is very similar to that of Die erste Elegie. The melodic material in the soprano part progresses largely in parallel fourths and is flavoured with small glissandos. Despite the ‘nocturno’ character, there are passionate outbursts and powerful emotions in the music.

Recordings

Rautavaara’s reputation as one of the greatest living Finnish composers is assured. Over his long career he has achieved success in a number of musical genres. But it is his choral works that have made him a household name. Recorded here is a fasc ...» More

With the wheel, with oil, leather, and the hammer. Ninety thousand miners taking silver from the rocks and children drawing stairs and perspectives.

But none of them could sleep, none of them wanted to be the river, none of them loved the huge leaves or the shoreline’s blue tongue.

Boys were battling with industry, and over bridges and rooftops, the mouth of the sky emptied herds of bison driven by the wind.

But none of them paused, none of them wanted to be a cloud, none of them looked for ferns or the yellow wheel of the tambourine.

As soon as the moon rises the pulleys will spin to upset the sky; a border of needles will besiege memory and the hearses [...]

Agony, agony, dream, ferment and dream. This is the world, my friend, agony, agony. Bodies decompose beneath the city clocks, war passes by in tears, followed by a million grey rats, the rich give their mistresses small illuminated dying things, and life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred.

Out in the sky, no one sleeps. No one, no one. No one sleeps. Lunar creatures sniff and circle the dwellings. Live iguanas will come to bite the men who don’t dream, and the broken-hearted fugitive will meet on street corners an incredible crocodile resting beneath the tender protest of the stars.

Out in the world, no one sleeps. No one, no one. No one sleeps. There is a corpse in the farthest graveyard complaining for three years because of an arid landscape in his knee; and a boy who was buried this morning cried so much they had to call the dogs to quiet him.

Life is no dream. Watch out! Watch out! Watch out! We fall down stairs and eat the moist earth, or we climb to the snow’s edge with the choir of dead dahlias. But there is no oblivion, no dream: raw flesh. Kisses tie mouths in a tangle of new veins and those in pain will bear it with no respite and those who are frightened by death will carry it on their shoulders.

One day horses will live in the taverns and furious ants will attack the skies that take refuge in the eyes of cattle. Another day. Watch out! Watch out! Watch out! Those still marked by claws and cloudburst, that boy who cries, or that corpse that has nothing more than its head and one shoe— they all must be led to the wall where iguanas and serpents wait, where the mummified hand of a child waits and the camel’s fur bristles with a violent blue chill.

Out in the sky, no one sleeps. No one, no one. No one sleeps. But if someone closes his eyes, whip him, my children, whip him! Let there be a panorama of open eyes and bitter inflamed wounds. Out in the world, no one sleeps. No one. No one.